Wednesday, June 18, 2008

New Design On MySpace Homepage

Here are Tom's (from MySpace) comments on the release:

Hey Folks! No doubt you've noticed the new login page with The Dark Knight animation when you logged in today. We've also changed the navigation and the user home page (only the new user home, not the classic). The new navigation gives you immediate access to commands without having to return to your home page. Your "inbox" link is now in the main nav - just click "mail" from anywhere on the site. I know it takes getting used to any change, but give it a chance and I think you'll find that things are laid out quite simply. To read more about the nav & home page changes, check the two blogs I posted as preview many months ago: navigation, new home page.

Initial thoughts:

This Is A Sales Driven HomepageThe sales people at MySpace have had enough. They have come in and said, if you want to make more money, stop trying to teach brands new behavior - lets just fit in with their old ones. Lets give them a page where they can re-use their television commercial and print ad.

100% Share Of Voice/Unmistakeable/Unmissable Brand Integration Based on eyetracking studies done by Jakob Nielsen, people don't look at advertisements and decide whether they will click on them or not, they do not see them at all.

MySpace is looking to make themselves one of the places on the web, that a brand can try to break out of that paradigm by pretty much owning the page to a point where you cannot miss it. The battle here will be between a consumer's ability to ignore and the brand's ability to takeover to a point where they cannot ignore.

BIG focus on video

Pretty much everything above the fold and not on nav bar, is all about video.